MC 5417
Candidate
Mana Donganont | Applied Math, University of Waterloo
Title
Consensus Problems in Multi-agent Systems
Abstract
A multi-agent system is a dynamic system that consists of a group of interacting agents
distributed over a network. In the past decades, the study of distributed coordination of multi-
agent systems has been widely attached by many groups of researchers such as mathematicians,
engineers, physicists, and others. This is partly due to its various applications in many areas,
including spacecraft formation ying, multiple robot coordination, ocking, consensus or syn-
chronization, cooperative control of vehicle formations, and others. As a fundamental problem
of distributed coordination, consensus means that a group of agents reach an agreement on the
consistent quality by designing appropriate control input based on local information. There are
many consensus methods that have been studied in the recent years. Some problems focused
on seeking the consensus of continuous-time multi-agent systems or discrete-time multi-agent
systems, the others considered consensus problems on hybrid systems which are dynamical sys-
tems involving the interaction of continuous and discrete dynamics. Many consensus algorithms
have been proposed for the multi-agent systems, but most results of consensus analysis are on
the situation that all agents are continuous-time or discrete-time dynamic behavior at the same
time.
There are, however, some situations that the discrete-time and continuous-time dynamic
agents coexist and interact with each other at the same time. Thus, it is reasonable to study
consensus problems in such hybrid multi-agent systems. Furthermore, by the fact that in real
networks, agents may exchange information with their neighbors regularly, meanwhile, they can
obtain some agents' information from their instantaneous contact, so we aim to study the con-
sensus problems in hybrid multi-agent systems described by impulsive systems. Moreover, since
time-delay is unavoidable in sampling and transmission of the impulsive information , we further
study consensus problems in hybrid multi-agent systems with delayed impulsive topology.